If you've seen the movie Minority Report you probably remember the impressing gesture based computer interface that Tom Cruise uses. Well, my experiment here is far from that, but nevertheless quite entertaining I think:

Minority Cube allows you to control the rotation of the cube on the screen by moving your hand (or yourself) in front of your webcam. All the calculations are done in the browser with Flash - there is no server-side processing involved. It currently understands up, down, left, right and screw (a motion a bit like if you're trying to screw a light bulb into your webcam's lens). If you don't have a webcam attached you will not be able to move it, I'm sorry. You might have to experiment a bit what's the best lighting situation, distance of your hand and motion speed.

Since I've been dug, I've just added a little extra: if you press the space bar, your webcam picture will be mapped to the cube. Doing the "screwing" motion in this mode will resize the texture. Unfortunately this will also reveal that my perspective mapping is far from perfect - but hey this is Flash 8, not Director or Java.

A note to Mac users - it seems like you might have adjust the settings of your iSight in order for Flash to receive the camera stream: right click on the cube, go to "settings", and specify video source is "firewire".

And another note to all the sceptics: of course I will not spy on you or download pictures on my server when you allow webcam access for this demo - but if you don't trust me on this you should unplug your net connection whilst playing around.